venticool is the international ventilative cooling platform launched in October 2012 to accelerate the uptake of ventilative cooling  by raising awareness, sharing experience and steering research and development efforts in the field of ventilative cooling. The platform supports better guidance for the appropriate implementation of ventilative cooling strategies as well as adequate credit for such strategies in building regulations. The platform philosophy is to pull resources together and to avoid duplicating efforts to maximize the impact of existing and new initiatives. venticool will join forces with organizations with significant experience and/or well identified in the field of ventilation and thermal comfort like AIVC (www.aivc.org) and REHVA (www.rehva.eu).

The platform was officially launched during the 33rd AIVC-2nd TightVent conference in Copenhagen, Oct. 10-11 2012 hosting 4 topical sessions on ventilative cooling. It has been initiated by INIVE EEIG with (International Network for Information on Ventilation and Energy Performance) with the financial and/or technical support of its partners.

Ventilative cooling in energy performance legislations

Because of their increasing weight on building design options, energy performance regulations have undoubtedly become key market drivers. This is a specific concern for ventilative cooling strategies as they require rather mature assessment methods for thermal comfort and ventilation losses to be correctly accounted for. In fact, adequate credit for ventilative cooling should account for thermal comfort criteria as well as ideally, indoor air quality, visual comfort, and noise. It should reflect the effective cooling potential which greatly varies within a single day, calling for rather sophisticated calculations seldom used in regulations. The good news is that CEN standards (in particular, EN 15251 and EN 15242) provide methods that could fill the gap. In any case, this will be a clear focus area of the ventilative cooling platform.